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Small Prophets ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
If TV feels full of loud, fast-paced, drippingly slick shows, then here is the antidote. A gentle, jewel-like, unhurried masterpiece that is funny, profound and manages to break and mend your heart in equal measures.
Small Prophets is a six-part, 30-minute British series, created and written by Mackenzie Crook (Detectorists, The Office). It follows the story of Michael Sleep, a lonely but not sad man whose partner, Clea, disappeared seven years ago.
Still believing she will return, Michael (played by British actor Pearce Quigley) lives a quiet life in an overgrown house at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac. He works at a Bunnings-like hardware chain and visits his father in a retirement home. His days are marked by noting the differing formations of his pressed wheat cereal pieces and taking the mickey out of his boss (played by Crook with thick glasses and a magnificently long and thin ponytail) and every hardware store customer.
“S’cuse me, do you sell buckets?” asks one customer of Michael, both of them standing before a mammoth wall of stacked blue buckets.
“Buckets?” Michael replies, deadpan. “No. No call for them. Old-fashioned.”
What follows is a conversation traversing disbelief, self-doubt and puzzled acceptance as Michael’s mischief leads his prey further down the garden path. We see many innocent customers lathered with utter tosh in early episodes.
Longhaired and bewhiskered, Sleep is filled with steady self-belief and optimism. But his life stopped when Clea didn’t come home. He has turned their living room into a shrine to a Christmas 50 years ago, and he is being chased by Clea’s oily and broke brother, Roy (Paul Kaye, Game of Thrones), to vacate the house Roy wants to inherit from his sister.
Michael’s father, Brian (Michael Palin), a well-travelled man now living in a nursing home, builds intricate contraptions between entering magazine prize competitions. He tells his son about homunculi, tiny prophesying humanoid spirits formed from medieval alchemy who answer any question correctly. Brian believes they’ll help find Clea and urges Michael to find his stored-away homunculi recipe and grow some.
Michael thinks this is nonsense but finds the recipe. He turns his garden shed into a laboratory, finds six big glass bottles, fills them with rainwater and adds a range of ingredients – amethyst quartz, an old silver coin, a gold ring, a brass key, a pen nib and a plain button.
Without giving anything away, he gets results. Crook’s use of stop-motion animation here, rather than CGI, brings another layer of old-school analogue to a show that already feels nostalgic.
It’s full of secondary characters built with depth, from Michael’s next-door neighbours – agitated, leaf-hating Clive; buoyant, slug-feeding Olive – to Kacey (Lauren Patel) whose aimless life as Michael’s co-worker blossoms when she joins his quest for answers from the homunculi. But it’s Quigley’s Michael whom we want to find happiness and the answers to where his great love is now.
With its unhurried pace, beautiful writing and affecting non-belly-laugh humour, Small Prophets is a marvellous study of non-toxic masculinity, too. It’s strange and beautiful and bears a poignancy that can crack the heart. The last episode ends with the words, “To be continued”, to which I gave a great sigh of relief. This is a magical slice of TV.
Small Prophets premieres at 8.30pm on Tuesday, June 23, on the ABC and ABC iview.
